The Size of the Universe - The Reach of Photons

One of the things that I was thinking about earlier today (and one that's been in my unpublished mind for a few years now) has to do with the physical size of the universe.
Lets take a look at my theories of the universe.

• I think the universe is nearly a perfect sphere (only if you're using a 3 dimensional perspective.)
  
• That the universe expands at least the speed of light from its center.
  
• If you traveled at the speed of light to reach the edge of the universe, you'd never be able to reach it, even if you were given an infinite amount of time to accomplish this. This means that the universe is infinite in its size, yet it is finite in size at any given frozen instance of time.
  
• That the true speed of light may be not be constant, and instead its speed is relative to the photon's distance and vector from the center of the universe. (The center of the universe is the mean distance between the absolute value of all mass.) The observed speed of light is from Earth seems constant, but any variance of velocity due to its relative position is extremely negligible. (Think about how small the Earth is, relative to the size of the entire universe... yea, that small.)
  

OK, so lets take a look at why I think these are true.

First, why would I think that the universe is perfectly sphere? To answer that is to simply say that if the universe formed from a central point. Then at some early time along the way, the density of the universe dropped low enough to allow photons to escape. Because the universe was likely in a spherical shape during this time period, the photons left this early universe in a sphere. Because of this, regardless of what happened to the internal structure of the universe, those photons will have remained on their course uninhibited by the limitless bounds of space. Because of the fact that gravity has the ability to bend light (see gravitational lensing) as well as the ability to pull in light (such as the case for black holes) we can assume that these photons accelerated until they reached the true maximum speed of light. Because of this, if you left Earth today and went in any direction at the speed of light, you'd never see the technical edge of the universe, even if you had all of eternity to do so. Because you could never leave the sphere of original photons, you could never leave the universe, and therefore the universe is infinite in size. Paradoxically, the universe has a finite size, but that assumes that you could measure it while time remained frozen.

The interesting thing would be the concept that placed you in observation of the universe if you held the position of the outer most photons. Not only would the universe appear to move and morph its shape much quicker than our observation on Earth due to special relativity, but it would also appear to be collapsing. If you observed your neighbors on the same outer shell they would appear to be getting further and further away, all at equal velocities. If you looked inward, your next inward neighbor would seem to be appear to be getting further away, but at an accelerated pace. Why accelerated? That would be of course due to the acceleration of photons because of its reduced interaction with the gravitational pull from the internal universe.

Finally, you may wonder why I think the speed of light is dependent on its vector relative to the mean center of the universe. This effect it highly negligible due to the vast expanse of the universe. There is a catch to this, path of a photon would also have an effect from the sum of the forces of gravity in the galaxy as well as our Sun. Those these latter effects are have not likely been measured, it would be theoretically noticeable, though on a trace level. By this, the speed of light would travel faster as you progress towards the Sun than as it would away from the Sun. Also, the path could be bent, or slightly accelerated (or decelerated) depending on the measured photon in reference to the center of the galaxy (dependent on whether the center of the galaxy is perpendicular or parallel to the direction of the measured photon.) If you could eliminate the error of these measurements you could do several really cool things. Amongst them, would be the ability to determine the center of the universe. In order to pull that off you would have to consider the Earth's position relative to the center of the Solar system and the solar system's position relative to the center of the galaxy. (Its also probably likely, but unclear until I see the math, that the neighboring stars in our band of the Milky Way have a greater effect on our solar system than the center of our galaxy by a direct line.) If this is true, then even that could be compensated for.

That brings me to another idea. We do have a pull from the center of the Milky Way, but instead of the direct linear influence that you would expect, its more due to the sum of all masses between us and our black hole center as you travel through the bands of our galaxy. In the suburbs of the galaxy, where we live, that's more likely the case. That brings out another realization that as you travel through the spiraling bands of a galaxy, the effects of the direct linear pull of gravity increase. Eventually the influence of the center becomes equal, and then greater than the effect of the nearby bands. Its because of this that you have the core, or sometimes bar of a spiral galaxy form.

After these considerations, I've already began to rethink the possibility of being able to determine the center of the universe. Its very likely that our galaxy is part of a larger structure of organization within our galaxy. Since this is not only possible, but very likely, its feasible to to conceive the idea that rather than detecting the center of the universe, we could detect the presence and perhaps magnitude of the influence from our sector of the band that forms our multi galactic structure. Again measurements would be effected by the vector of photons relative to the structure of our extra galactic band. Because of the size of the band that we likely inhabit, and due to the overpowering gravity of our local galaxy and solar system, calculating this to any precise number would prove to be extremely difficult. But, none-the-less its theorectically possible as long as you fine tune the calculations of the effects of every structure on our scale.

That concludes this session of my stream of conscious thoughts for now. Its 1 AM and I'm getting rather tired. I'll have to re-read this and make any editions at a later time. I'll be curious to see how much of any of this makes any sense. In addition to that, I'll be wanting to look for the possibility that someone has already thought through these concepts and I'd be very curious to see the work done on this subject.